Writing Slowly Posts, 2024 Edition

For your browsing pleasure, here are all 45 of my main posts from 2024 (I’ve missed out the short ones).

There’s also a list of the posts of 2025 and the posts of 2023 too.

Enjoy!

And don’t forget to check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
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Writing

Oct 29, 2024: Busybody, hunter, dancer - which is your curiosity style?

Oct 28, 2024: Three styles of curiosity - so which one is yours?

Sep 18, 2024: How to write an article from your notes - an example

Sep 11, 2024: The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful

Jul 31, 2024: Feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes: Jane Austen’s timely advice for writers and creators

Jun 29, 2024: Something from nothing is no fairy tale. Puss in Boots is my hero: he made something from nothing, and so can we.

Jun 13, 2024: Five useful articles about writing Here are five links with worthwhile writing advice.

Mar 21, 2024: Work as if writing is the only thing that matters “Having a clear, tangible purpose when you consume information completely changes the way you engage with it."

Feb 25, 2024: Give it, give it all, give it now - Annie Dillard on the writing life.

Feb 8, 2024: At last, writing slowly is back in fashion! Cal Newport, author of Slow Productivity, has finally grasped the premise of this website: you can get a lot done by writing slowly.

Jan 27, 2024: Soon we’ll all be writing the books we want to read. To benefit from AI-assisted writing, look closely at how it’s transforming the readers.

Making Notes

Dec 1, 2024: Zettelkasten anti-patterns When developing your collection of linked notes, what have you learned not to do?

Nov 25, 2024: Atomic notes and the unit record principle.This concept pre-dates the digital era, and to a significant extent the digital era presupposes it.

Nov 24, 2024: How to write a better note without melting your brain. “The note you just took has yet to realize its potential,” says Bob Doto. No shit.

Nov 10, 2024: Not just notes: another meaning of ‘Zettel’. Weaving is a fundamental mode of creativity.

Oct 17, 2024: Why not make notes by hand?

Oct 14, 2024: So many note-taking apps in the app graveyard - but not all are zombies

Sep 2, 2024: Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes

Aug 17, 2024: How to get Strata for micro.blog up and running. It’s a notes app for micro.blog users.

Jul 30, 2024: My favourite tool is this notebook I made. I couldn’t find a note-making app that really suited me so I made one myself.

Jul 29, 2024: Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget. Do we really need to remember everything?

Jul 28, 2024: Making notes will aid your short-term memory, even when you haven’t got one

Jul 14, 2024: A System for Writing by Bob Doto

Jun 14, 2024: Why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity? Yes indeed, why not?

Jun 13, 2024: A minimal approach to making notes

Jun 2, 2024: A forest of evergreen notes

May 27, 2024: Make your notes a creative working environment

Mar 31, 2024: When it comes to writing notes, how much mess is just enough? Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, likes to keep his notes messy.

Mar 30, 2024: Don’t make a Zitatsalat out of your writing. Zitatsalat? What does that even mean?

Mar 13, 2024: The card index system is ‘a thing alive’ - or is it?

Mar 6, 2024: How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience. An organized collection of notes can help you make sense of your knowledge, and then make better use of it.

Feb 12, 2024: How to overcome Fetzenwissen: the illusion of integrated thought. It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge.

Feb 11, 2024: From fragments you can build a greater whole. Everything large and significant began as small and insignificant. This is my working philosophy of creativity and I’m trying to follow it.

Feb 11, 2024: How to decide what to include in your notes. I have a simple filter.

Jan 29, 2024: Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom? What does it mean to write notes ‘from the bottom up’, instead of ‘from the top down’?

Jan 28, 2024: Ross Ashby’s other card index. A British cyberneticist kept his notes in 25 journals, for which he devised an extensive card index of more than 1,600 cards.

Jan 26, 2024: Even the index is just another note It’s tempting to place your notes in fixed categories but here’s what to do instead.

Jan 10, 2024: Three worthwhile modes of note-making (and one not-so-worthwhile). How I made notes on Alex Kerr’s Finding the Heart Sutra.

Other

Oct 12, 2024: The truth according to Trump

Apr 29, 2024: Is the Web reconfiguring itself again? Is the web falling apart?, Eric Gregorich wonders. Meanwhile Manuel Moreale is confident that the web is not dying. I agree with both of them.

Mar 31, 2024: How to set your own agenda Harrison Owen, who died in March 2024, invented one of the most hopeful approaches to group facilitation I’ve ever come across.

Mar 8, 2024: How to make Mastodon even more fun! Here are a couple of fun websites that will make Mastodon (and possibly the whole fediverse) even more fun.

Feb 26, 2024: Yes, we can be heroes, but does that mean we should be? Thanks David Bowie but perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.

Jan 30, 2024: Thinking nothing of walking long distances How far is too far to walk?

Jan 28, 2024: Can we understand consciousness yet? Professor Mark Solms revives the Freudian view that consciousness is driven by basic physiological motivations such as hunger.

The April Photo Challenge

Apr 30, 2024: 📷 Day 30: hometown

Apr 29, 2024: 📷 Day 29: drift

Apr 28, 2024: 📷 Day 28: Community. Spotted at a rally in Sydney: “Let’s dream new blueprints for the world we want to live in…”

Apr 27, 2024: 📷 Day 27: it’s always a lovely surprise to receive a bespoke selection of books in the mail, from the Wild Book Box.

Apr 26, 2024: 📷 Day 26: critter. It’s a bluebottle, or Portuguese man o’ war. These wash up on the beach, mainly in late Summer and early Autumn.

Apr 25, 2024: 📷 Day 25: spine. This is ‘Echidna’ by Illawarra artist Ian Gentle.

Apr 24, 2024: 📷 Day 24: light. I took this shot as we saw in the new year on the beach.

Apr 23, 2024: 📷 Day 23: dreamy. On the weekend I visited White Bay Power Station for the Sydney Biennale. Reopened after 40 years mothballed!

Apr 23, 2024: 📷 Day 22: blue. This is the ocean pool at Kiama, NSW.

Apr 21, 2024: 📷 Day 21: mountain. This is Black Mountain, the unlikely centre of Canberra.

Apr 20, 2024: 📷 Day 20: ice Memories of Norway.

Apr 19, 2024: 📷Day 19: birthday On my birthday this year I visited an exhibition of the artist Louise Bourgeois.

Apr 18, 2024: 📷 Day 18: mood The Blue Mountains, in one of their mysterious moods.

Apr 17, 2024: 📷 Day 17: transcendence

Apr 16, 2024: 📷 Day 16: flâneur

Apr 16, 2024: 📷 Day 15: small

Apr 15, 2024: 📷 Day 14: cactus. This is from ‘The Channel Series’, by Karl de Waal, as seen at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Apr 13, 2024: 📷 Day 13: page. Fantastic marginalia on this page of a manuscript at the State Library of Victoria.

Apr 12, 2024: 📷 Day 12: magic

Apr 11, 2024: 📷 Day 11: sky

Apr 10, 2024: 📷 Day 10: train

Apr 9, 2024: 📷 Day 9: crispy

Apr 8, 2024: 📷 Day 8: prevention.

Apr 8, 2024: 📷 Day 7: I’ve posted this photo before but it’s definitely my idea of wellbeing.

Apr 6, 2024: 📷 day 6: windy

Apr 6, 2024: 📷 Day 5: serene

Apr 4, 2024: 📷 Micro.blog photo challenge April 2024. Day 4: foliage #mbapr

Apr 3, 2024: Micro.blog photo challenge April 2024. Day 3: Card. My daughter made this card for my birthday, to go with a themed collection of sci-fi novels.

Apr 2, 2024: 📷 Micro.blog photo challenge April 2024. Day 2: Flowers. This extraordinary bunch came our way. What a beautiful gift! #mbapr

Apr 1, 2024: 📷Micro.blog photo challenge April 2024. Day 1: toy